PROTOTYPESExperimentations in game design

​This page contains prototypes that are experiments in game design. They were developed by myself to help me evaluate whether or not a particular game / concept would be good enough to work on and invest several months/years of time and effort into.

Memento Mori

A first-person mystery game where the player must use a variety of deduction methods and reasoning to determine the fates of everyone on the island.

The player would find a skeleton and travel back in time to the exact moment that person met their tragic fate (the flashback). The player would have to both carefully listen to the dialogue, observe the (flashback's) environment to determine the fate of a person. In many cases, the player would have to cross-reference multiple sources to uncover someone's name.

Although the prototype is relatively small, I envisioned this game to be set on a small, open-world island where the player would have to travel to multiple locations to sometimes figure out the name of a person.

I consider Memento Mori a very good prototype, as it answered some questions related to the project that I am currently working on, "The Apartment".

Satellite

In this prototype, I wanted to convey humanity's obession with the past, and our longing to go back in time and change the past-- for better or worse. Despite these wishes, we often forget that our choices have formed us into the very persons that we are today. Since we cannot physically go back in time and change things that have a persistent effect in the future, we can only try to deny who we are and by destroying who we are.

If we were to actively try and destroy our pasts, aren't we metaphorically "killing" ourselves?

I would consider Satellite to be a relatively good prototype, but I think I approached this from too high-level concept, which ultimately turned the prototype into more of art-house film, instead of a prototype with satisfying gameplay.If I were to make Satellite 2 (which may happen at some point in the future), I would

Foursided portal

In this prototype, the four boundaries of the screen act as portals that lead to the opposite side of the screen from which it was entered.

The process of designing the gameplay for this prototype was more like a process of experimentation,which then quickly turned into a process of discovery. I started by programming the absolute basics of the game, and then said"Let's see what happens.". I quickly discovered that there are a lot of interesting situations that emerged from that. I built the puzzles around those situations and concepts.

In a way. the game designed itself. All I had to do was scoop away some dirt to find it.